d comes back again
to the public through the channel of imposition. If the whole or any
part of that income be saved, so much new capital is generated,--the
infallible operation of which is to lower the value of money, and
consequently to conduce towards the improvement of public credit.

I take the expenditure of the _capitalist_, not the value of the
capital, as my standard; because it is the standard upon which, amongst
us, property, as an object of taxation, is rated. In this country, land
and offices only excepted, we raise no faculty tax. We preserve the
faculty from the expense. Our taxes, for the far greater portion, fly
over the heads of the lowest classes. They escape too, who, with better
ability, voluntarily subject themselves to the harsh discipline of a
rigid necessity. With us, labor and frugality, the parents of riches,
are spared, and wisely too. The moment men cease to augment the common
stock, the moment they no longer enrich it by their industry or their
self-denial, their luxury and even their ease are obliged to pay
contribution to the public; not because they are vicious principles, but
because they are unproductive. If, in fact, the interest paid by the
public had not thus revolved again into its own fund, if this secretion
had not again been absorbed into the mass of blood, it would have been
impossible for the nation to have existed to this time under such a
debt. But under the debt it does exist and flourish; and this
flourishing state of existence in no small degree is owing to the
contribution from the debt to the payment. Whatever, therefore, is taken
from that capital by too close a bargain is but a delusive advantage: it
is so much lost to the public in another way. This matter cannot, on the
one side or the other, be metaphysically pursued to the extreme; but it
is a consideration of which, in all discussions of this kind, we ought
never wholly to lose sight.

It is never, therefore, wise to quarrel with the interested views of
men, whilst they are combined with the public interest and promote it:
it is our business to tie the knot, if possible, closer. Resources that
are derived from extraordinary virtues, as such virtues are rare, so
they must be unproductive. It is a good thing for a moneyed man to
pledge his property on the welfare of his country: he shows that he
places his treasure where his heart is; and revolving in this circle, we
know, that, "wherever a man's treasure is, ther